Payday 2's unofficial modding tool yields its first full heist

Out of Frame was created with the newly-updated BeardLib editor.

Out of Frame, the “first full custom heist” for Payday 2, sets players against a man named David Tremblay, who has a stockpile of gold, weapons, and other valuables stashed away in his upscale condo. He also has a team of tough, combat-hardened Gensec security personnel patrolling the place. In other words, keeping things quiet on this job might be a good idea.

The heist description makes it clear that silence (or at least a good clean-up) is golden. “Pay attention to your surroundings. Anything can go wrong in a heartbeat," it says. "Use objects to hide yourself from the guards. Learn and outstmart them. But if you have to, get rid of them and find somewhere safe to leave the body. We only have one chance, so make it count!”

A quality stealth mission is always good fun, but even more significant is how it was made. The BeardLib Editor, an unofficial modding tool that was originally launched in January, now has a dramatically expanded feature set and modules that simplify the creation of quality Payday 2 mods.

“When we were developing the new version of BeardLib one of the main goals was to implement a new ‘Module’ system. The goal of which would be to unify basic code for mods and thus lowering the barrier for users to create quality BLT mods. Similar to how BLT revolutionized Lua modding for Payday, allowing for a widespread increase in good Lua mods which were incredibly scarce before,” the expanded BeardLib description explains. “With this modders will no longer have to implement basic features like Settings, Option menus or even rudimentary things like Localization or Class loading. The latter may only require a few lines, but their implementation as modules means that only an xml definition is required to achieve a fully functioning mod.”

It's still a work in progress and so “issues are expected,” but the response on the Out of Frame download page (it's free, by the way) seems very positive. The BeardLib editor is free as well, both of them from lastbullet.net.